This is the sixth installment of Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown’s recent travels to Greece. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.

The final important, and perhaps most evocative and beautiful site to visit is “Homer’s Tomb,” a 13km/half-hour drive from the hotel.  The road weaves a scenic  route to the northeast point of the island, the last kilometers being perched on steep hillsides with sweeping views of the sea, and virtually no habitations, a truly wild and unchanged scene that haunts me still in its magnificence.

Who was Homer?  We don’t know.  All we really have is the canon of “his” works, the Iliad and the Odessey, but whether the poems are a collection of contributions by various bards, or truly the work of one man, we cannot say; the poems were transmitted by memory for many years before being finally written down, as we believe, sometime in the reign of Peisistratus, who ruled Athens in the early 550s and from 546 BC until his death in 527.  Little remains of his widespread building projects, but if he was indeed responsible for the gathering together of the Homeric poems, perhaps that is glory enough for any man (see Mary Renault’s The Praise Singer).

So whose tomb is it?  Again, we don’t know, but we can surmise by its remote but superb location, that it was someone of great importance and respect, and it has been identified as Homer’s tomb from as early as Herodotus (484 – c. 425 BC), who speaks of it in his Histories. Homer’s mother was reputed to be from Ios, and many legends have him dying there.  But whoever lay there, it is someone’s tomb, and we must pay it reverence.  But thinking of Homer, we might say in the mood of W. B. Yeats, who wrote in another context (The Cloths of Heaven):

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

On the way back to the hotel from the tomb, I reflected on the waves of populations and civilizations that have washed over these islands throughout history: the Cycladic, the Minoan and Mycenaean, the Romans, the Crusaders and the Turks, all more or less as the case may be, destroying or overbuilding much of what came before.

The latest in this line of invasions is, I believe, the tourist invasion, brought about by late 20th century ease of transportation. And it may well be the most destructive of all, for it has wiped out the traditional ways of life. Villages have grown to meet the tourist trade and grown beyond recognition with their seasonal hotels and multitudes of restaurants, paved roads and cars and trucks are everywhere, and to a large extent, the agrarian economy, which remained largely unchanged for millennia, is gone, as witnessed by the many-now-abandoned terraces where many generations of islanders planted their crops and nurtured what soil they could scrape together. Is it good – or bad? If we measure a civilization by its organic adaptation to its environment, or by the permanence of its structures and monuments, surely, despite the advantages of electricity, paving, easy transportation, it is not all good, and the future of these islands is hard to read.

A Stop Along the Road to Naxos 

On the way to Naxos the ferry makes a stop at Santorini. The island as it now stands is both a huge tourist trap in season, but also the producer of some of Greece’s best wines.  Note the prices:

But from an archeological/historical viewpoint rather than an oenological one, Santorini (officially Thira, or Θήρα) was the site of the largest  volcanic explosion in recorded history, circa 1600 BC. The resulting tsunami is thought by some to have put an end to Minoan civilization on Crete, or to have been the origin of the Atlantis story. Estimates of the amount of volcanic material (tephra) ejected during the eruption range as high as 28 cubic kilometers. Villages smashed by the resulting tsunami have been found as far away as Turkish coastal regions.

The ferry passes some smaller islands on the way to the terminal – these are part of the pre-eruption island – and a central cone which is still active and growing.

You can read about the eruption, but when the ferry rounds Therasia and you enter the bay, what you are sailing into is the caldera, and it is seven and a half miles by four and a third miles across. For comparison locally, the distance from Edmonds to Kingston is 4.3 miles.

Those cliffs rise almost 1,000 feet above the water and plunge to a maximum depth of 1,263 feet.

I did not go ashore at Santorini; that’s a reason for the next trip! But the sheer scale of the caldera and the unimaginable violence that created it impose an awe that lasted me for days.

Miraculously, a small portion of the pre-eruption settlement at Akrotiri — on the eastern side of the island — is being excavated from the ash and lava that covered it, revealing buildings up to two stories and with plumbing on the upper levels. It is our best glimpse into Minoan civilization, and bits of the frescos found are on exhibit in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with some objects that have been reconstructed by pouring plaster into the holes left by decaying wood. No bodies have been found, and it is currently thought that earthquakes may have prompted an evacuation of the island before the eruption.

Next — Part 7:  Naxos

Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the US Cross-Country team in 1989. He was the first American to take over technical services for a foreign team (Slovenia) and worked also for Germany and Sweden. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training; the latest was The Complete Guide to Cross-Country Ski Preparation (Mountaineers Books) which has gone through two editions and a Russian translation. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement.